Congratulations Hatshepsut!

Hatshepsut was so upset about her neighbors that she didn't notice that she'd passed the 4,000 hit mark.

Way to go Hatshepsut!

More Ignorance: Arik Ascherman Strikes Again

A friend of mine once taught at City College in NY. It's not in a great neighborhood. Once a colleague of his was mugged and had the crap beaten out of him. Faint from the beating and bloody to boot, he was carried into his office. As they carried him in he muttered over and over: 'It's all our fault!'

Arik Ascherman is that guy. Israelis get murdered and we should bleed, not fight back unless it's by the Marquess of Queensbury rules. In today's Haaretz he does it again. The man is a blatant ignoramous. I'm not just name calling. He's a Jewish illiterate, and he uses his lack of literacy to put our soldiers at risk. Why? Because even when we have to fight back, it's our fault.

But why get carried away? What does he say? Well, Rabbi Yuval Sherlo wrote that if somebody comes to kill you, kill them first. Common sense? One might think so. Not for Arik, however. He comes up with a caveat from the Talmud that if you can avoid te attack by wounding him, that's preferable. As a result, this genius writes: The injunction does not permit an attack on a terrorist when he is not a "pursuer," when he is not endangering life concretely and in practice. Certainly it does not permit becoming involved in a situation in which one is constrained to kill innocent people who are near the pursuer.

In other words, you can only take out a terrorist if he's got his hand on the detonator! So, no more hitting Hamas. No preventative strikes. Wait! You know what according to our friend Ascherman, Israel would have lost the Six Day War. The Egyptians were planning an air attack on us, similar to he one we pulled off first. Oh. I forgot. We're not allowed to strike first. I guess that would have worked out for Arik. No Israel. No problem.

Then there is the question of civilians. No army on earth tries to avoid civilian casualties the way that ours does. Dozens of soldiers were kllled and wounded in Jenin in order to minimize civilian casualties. Looters were arrested. However, when the terrorists are hidden by the population, supported by the population, fed and clothed by civilians then a choice must be made. It's painful. But war is hell. That was first said by William Tecumsuh Sherman, the man who invented modern warfare. Oh, but maybe Arik would have preferred that the Union settle with the Confederacy. That way, there would still be Black Slavery in North America.

The Temple Mount is Falling!

So now it's official (as if we didn't know before). HaAretz reports that the illegal creation of a mega-mosque under the Al-Aqsa Mosque included moving support beams. (Never mind the criminal destruction of invaluable archaeological finds.) So, if nothing's done. the Al-Aqsa mosque will collapse on the prayers underneath. Thousands may be killed. And you know who they"ll blame? The Jews, the evil Israelis, the Zionist devils, the occupation...who knows. So thirty seven years of kowtowing to the Waqf, of denying Jewish rights on Har HaBayit, of allowing the criminal destruction of the remnants of three millenia will result in a disaster that will take its price in lives.

And who will they blame? Us. And you know what, they"ll be right. Because in 1967 we let them keep Har HaBayit when they offered it to us on a platter.

Worldwide Jihad

I just came across an interesting site called Internet Haganah. It documents all sorts of jihadist activity in the US and elsewhere. I found it referenced as a 'Great Satan' by some guy named 'Allah is in the House. I figured, if he thinks it's bad, it must be pretty good. I wasn't wrong.

In Defence of the Non-Golus-Jew

Ben-Chorin has a post today, which is MUST reading.

A number of comments on my previous post argued that Israel is "losing its humanity" and such as a result of the "occupation". Such cliches are often used by enemies of Israel who wish to weaken Israel by holding it to a higher standard of "humanity" than they hold the rest of the world. Such people are best ignored. However, some of those who responded to my post struck me not as enemies but rather as sincerely concerned Jews. I owe them a response....

Swedish Anti-Semitism I

The indefatigable Hatshepsut just posted part of an article about Swedish anti-semitism and Swedish anti-Zionism that appeared in Honest Reporting. It's absolutely required reading.

Unfortunately, it's only the tip of the iceberg, as Hatshepsut notes. In fact, a few months ago, Amnon Lord published an article in Makor Rishon in which he discusses Roland Huntford's, The New Totalitarians. Huntford is a professor at Oxford who blew the cover off of Swedish neutrality. He showed that the press in Sweden is government subsidized and therefore reflects only what the government thinks. What that government thinks is terrifying. According to Lord's article, since 1967 (at least) Sweden has been devoted to the dissolution of the State of Israel, and its substitution by a Palestinian State. So, really, there's nothing surprising about the Swedish papers. They only reflect their masters' voice.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

Paternalism is really an illness. You know about paternalism. That's when you say something you truly believe in and the person you tell looks at you with this sickeningly all-knowing look and says something like: 'You really don't believe that. Do you?" Or, 'I know better than you how you should feel.' It's creepy beyond belief, because when you say something from your gut, you're exposed. You took a chance and put aside your defenses and WHAM! the other guy dismisses you like you were some kind of drivelling idiot.

You don't like that kind of treatment? Well, neither does anyone else. Yet that's exactly the way PC Liberals and Leftists treat Muslims. When Muslims say they oppose what the West represents because it's corrupt or immodest, or blasphemous they mean it. What do Liberals say? 'You really don't mean that. Jihad can't be against pluralism. You're just responding to Jewish and American injustices. If these were removed you"ll be fine.' What does 'fine' mean? It means just like us. The argument seems to go: Anyone who's human has a mind. Anyone with a mind will be a PC Liberal. Therefore, humans are PC Liberals.

Is it any wonder that Muslims recoil in the face of Western disrespect? I have news for the orthodox PC'ers. Most Muslims relate to reality differently than you do. Mostr Muslims believe that Jews and Christians should be second class citizens, or dhimmi. If you want an, unfortunately, representative portrayal of what American Muslims think of Jews , especially the liberal kind, try Aisha's ideas on for size.

Useful Idiots: Israel Style II

About ten years ago I got a ride from a friend who's a famous scholar at Hebrew University. At the time, it was becoming very clear that the debate over the Oslo accords was really a debate over whether Israel should be a Jewish State.

[Let me explain, Beilin and Company are adamently against Israel being tangibly Jewish. If you read anything written in the last ten years by Beilin, Aloni, Pundak, Savir, Peres, Gideon Levi, Daniel Ben Simon etc. you"ll see that Judaism (of any stripe) is not part of the plan. Hence, Meron Bevenisti caled for changing the flag, the anthem and God knows what else in order to have peace.
Amos Oz, who's been doing Teshuva for years because Dr. Joseph Klausner was his uncle, has always wanted Judaism tossed out. He sees Jews as living in a museum, a bunch of fossils.

Anyway, I asked him if he thought there was historical precedent for what was going on. He said that there was. The program of the Hellenists in the period of Antiochus IV Epiphanes was a principled agenda of assimilation an cultural self-immolation. That's what IMacc. 1, 11 means: "Let us go and make an alliance with the Gentiles all around us; since we separated from them, many evils have come upon us." So, he continued, we're at the stage where Menelaus is the High Priest, the Tobiads are ruling the country, the Jews are in deep trouble, the Torah's attacked by all of the 'enlightened' elements of society, and there's no Mattathias on the horizen.

This week reminded me that things have gone from bad to worse. Justice Barak and his co-horts are on a roll undermining anything Jewish here. A judge in a district court is forcing a couple to do DNA testing to determine a baby's parentage, even though it will prove mamzerut, Poraz (in his role as Menelaus) is regularizing the status of goyyim born here but refuses to recognize converts, Eretz Aheret magazine is publishing articles supporting intermarriage ('Love conquers All") etc etc etc.

Ignorance is Hardly Bliss: On Rabbis for Human Rights

This morning, the Israeli papers and radio reported that a group of rabbis had called on the government to be less concerned with collateral casualties in fighting terror. In that context, they invoked the principle of 'If someone comes to kill you, kill him first.' The impression was, that these rabbis wanted the army to indiscriminately bomb civilians, if it meant getting terrorists too. The impression was, apparently, confirmed by the signators who were cited. Chief among them was Rabbi Dov Lior of Qiryat Arba who once said that it was better to kill an Arab than allow a Jew to be scratched.

My first reaction was a stomach ache. Again, I thought, extremists have made us (and the Torah) look stupid. After I got off of my high horse, I read the full statement and saw that a) this statement was not made by 'the usual suspects' and b) it explicitly affirmed the quest for peace and for minimizing casualties among civilians. The poit that they wished to make was that if killing a teerorist will save human lives, then the mere possibility of civilian casualties should not be invoked to stop such an attack. Ok, I thoughy. That makes sense.

The statement was discussed on Reshet Bet this morning by Rabbi Yuval Sherlo, of Yeshivat Petah Tikva and Rabbi Arik Ascherman, from Rabbis for Human Rights. I was happy that the discussion did not degenerate into the usual Israeli scream-fest. Both acquitted themselves like gentlemen.

What really set me off, however, was Rabbi Ascherman's distortion of Jewish sources. He claimed that Rabbinic tradition has a consideration that balances the rule of 'kill him first.' That rule is 'Who says your blood is redder?' (Sanhedrin 74a). In other words, before killing you need to think that the other person is worth as much, if not more than you. Such a conclusion doesn't 'balance' self-defense, it delegitimizes it! Indeed, it would lead to the Christian position of 'turn the other cheek.' More importantly, Rabbi Ascherman is just plain wrong. There is absolutely no such rule in the present context! The words cited by Rabbi Ascherman are those of Rava. They refer to a situation in which a third party gives a person the choice between killing someone or being killed. It is in that case only that one is not allowed to save one's life at the expense of another. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with a situation in which a person must defend himself (even proactively).

I'm not sure what to make of this distortion. I am assuming that Rabbi ascherman either misunderstood the passage he cites, or that he lacks a basic background in rabbinic sources. I hope he's not simply using the Torah for his own ideological purposes. For, while he (and anyone else) has the right to his principled opinion, noone has the right to distort or misrepresent their sources. Such an action is both dishonest and deceptive. Understanding things honestly is also a human right.

Jewish Pathology: Mourning Sheikh Yassin II

A person needs to admit he was wrong. I was stunned at our Professor from Stoneybrook for mourning Sheikh Yassin and thought that Israelis on the Left also thought that he (and Hamas) deserved what they got.

I was wrong. Danny Rubinstein, Arafat fan and biographer has today warned his readers that Al-Qaeda is worse than Hamas. Hence, he says:

Israel's government - which boycotts the Palestinians' national government and no longer views it as a partner for diplomatic dialogue, and is now also threatening to attack Hamas leaders in Syria - is thus liable to bring about a situation in which, on the ruins of these organizations, wild growths that are many times crueler and more dangerous will spring up

So, we should be nice to Hamas because Al-Qaeda is worse? What planet does this guy live on?

Useful Idiots: Israeli Style I

The past few days I've been reading Mona Charen's book, Useful Idiots:How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First. It's an amazing expose of the kind of ultra-orthodoxy of the Leftist and Liberal Left (communisants as Raymond Aron called them in The Opium of the Intellectuals). in the context of the Cold War. The upshot of Charen's book is that neither the Left nor the Liberals ever wanted the West to win the Cold War. Their passon is to bash the US, even as the communist bloc committed crimes next to which the failings of the United States blanche. Now the same geniuses are apologizing for Islamism and blaming the US for the rise of Islamic terror.

The book is a gripping and angering read. It also hits home here in the Holy Land, because this is exactly how the denizens of the State of Tel Aviv deal with the ongoing fight between us and the Arabs. Nothing Arabs do is wrong (or unjustifiable). Everything Jews do is racist etc. etc. blah blah blah. Now, there certainly are awful things we've done (or been forced to do). Yet even Benny Morris has admitted that we come out far better than they. But then, of course, Morris is no longer loved by the Left because it turns out that, at the end of the day, he's a Zionist. He dares to say that the Jewish People has a right to exist and to exist in its own country. That's too much for the Israeli Left, who Dan Margalit has called the Palestinian Right.

Anyway, from time to time I'm going to try to collect and post 'Useful Idiot' comments that come my way. Might even be worth a book. Meanwhile, read Charen's and Amnon Lord's The Israeli Left.

Jewish Pathology: Mourning Sheikh Yassin

There's this great book by a professor at Bar Ilan named Barry Rubin, entitled Assimilation and its Discontents. Through a mixture of anecdotes, social and historical analysis, he brilliantly describes the pathology of Jewish assimilationism and self-hatred. It's a wonderful book and should be a required read. His upshot is that assimilationism is not just passive national suicide. It often manifests itself as support for the murder of Jews (or defending and assisting their murderers).

I was thinking about Rubin's book after I read an unbelievable piece that's been circulating around leftist websites. It's called We Are All Targets Now and it's by a professor who specializes (of all things) in medieval anti-Judaism and its artistic representation. She describes her shock, fear and rage at the killing of Sheikh Yassin. After hearing the news that Yassin had been taken out, she writes: My husband jumped out of bed and started to curse. Our visiting friend couldn't get over the evil of attacking an 80-year-old quadriplegic cleric. I'm afraid -- because I suppose it's a sign of how living here can deaden one's ethical senses -- that my husband and I were mostly overwhelmed by the sheer, massive, criminal, reckless stupidity of the thing.

I was so stunned by this that I had to read it three times before I believed it! Who are they kidding? This 80 year old quadriplegic ordered the murders of innocent people, including little children and people older abnd more infirm than he. As for being a cleric, need we recall who ordered the bombing on Seder Night of the Park Hotel in Netanya? Why even Yossi Sarid agreed that Yassin deserved to die for his crimes, and now we know that his liquidation, and that of Rantisi, have been partly responsible for the quiet we enjoyed until this week's bombings in Beer Sheva.

It's gotta be a pathology with some people. There's no other way to explain it. Rubin recalls one socialist theorist who believed that all nations and ethnic groups have a right to live except the Jews. They need to disappear, for the good of humanity. Hmmm...Dying for the salvation of mankind? As Rubin notes, wrong religion (though the idea originated with a Jew- Paul of Tarsus).

Oh, and if you want to read an amazing psychiatric study of this pathology, there's Sander Gillman's book, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews.